PINA BAUSCH was once dubbed the Wicked Fairy of German Ballet, but no choreographer in contemporary dance is more sensitive to her surroundings.

As the head of Germany's Tanztheater Wuppertal since the early 1970s, Bausch has forged a hugely influential style that weds modern dance idioms and an avant-garde theatrical sensibility. Buoyed by her canny use of music and decor, Bausch's productions are often arresting, provocative and utterly unforgettable.

The Tanztheater Wuppertal opens a three-night run at Zellerbach Hall on Friday in its first Bay Area appearance since 1999's Cal Performances production of "Nelken," a piece set in a field of pink carnations

Rachel Howard reviews Pina Bausch as part of a 3-fer article (hence the generic title):

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Stepping out to Bay Area dance eventsRachel Howard, San Francisco Chronicle

To hear the buzz, you might have thought the messiah was returning to UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall on Friday, and, to her followers, that may not be too exalted a description for Pina Bausch, whose Tanztheater Wuppertal made its first Cal Performances appearance in eight years. Bausch is a choreographer so iconic that people in the dance world tend to forget that other reasonably culturally educated people may not know who she is. And for more than 25 years she's been a choreographer so influential that to see her work is also to recognize the legions of emulators and imitators she's spawned.more

For as long as the nation states remain vehicles for distributing or monopolizing wealth no matter how outdated they’ve become in the context of increased cross-cultural communication and advanced technology, their anomalies will be the grist for our plays, choreography and exhibitions. After all, where else besides the graveyard would those pesky anomalies find a permanent home?

Where once Daimler Benz, Dortmunde and Volkswagen comprised the grundrisse of the world’s technology and attendant concentration of capital, now it looks like Asian competitors are threatening to upset the Euro-intoxicated Weltanshuaang. The theatrically and choreographically brilliant Pina Bausch has determined that such a shift is culturally noteworthy and she so she gives us “Ten Chi,” which with Bausch’s company Wuppertal, made its way to Zellebach Auditorium in Berkeley on November 16, 2007.

To Chinese dulcimer accompaniment, a fluid dancer in a willowy-but-not-billowy yellow dress, whose name may be Na Young Kim, opens the piece with a series of engrossing, perfectly-timed movements that with increased urgency send her entire body along all its possible directional axes. She is miming bird wings and then drops suddenly to the floor. Next it’s bourrées cross-hatched with pendulum swings that end up with vibrating buttocks. It can be so mesmerizing as to be hypnotic—or even sleep-inducing.

Men in black join the women in peacock-like steps across a shifting plane. With great gusto, a dancer rips off swatches of tulle from her costume, her partner unburdening her of most of what remains, turning the tide from dulcet “pure movement” to something along the more ignoble lines of hedonistic lust. Slumber no longer beckons—you’ve got my attention now—even while distracted by feelings of sympathy for the company’s wardrobe mistress. Still, onstage a dream unfolds around things nocturnal, prompted by a little tutorial on snoring led by Dominique Mercy, the company’s eminence grise from back in the day when every self-respecting European businessman required and would buy his watch on the Rhine.

Then a metronome changes the mood again back to silk and away from theatrics. To and fro it goes for more than two hours of flawless showmanship, buttressed by the acting skills of the gravel-voiced Mechtilde Großmann and the fearless dancing of Eddie Martínez. There are bejeweled little boîte moments, such as a male dancer who tucks the train of his female partner’s long white evening gown into the collar of his shirt like a dinner napkin. It makes us feel grateful that the spirit of Victor Borge is alive and well in Europe today. On the other hand, a mocking recitation of the glut of Japanese-made popular communication technology is where the music stops in a “Cabaret”-like moment. To me these words—spoken in jest by a European artist today—congeal into a cultural gesture reflective of the cutthroat economic competition increasingly felt between vestigial nation states. In the not-too-distant future, I fear that those damen und herren who live through it, will look back upon this script as a less-than-innocent, less-than-jocular salvo in the propaganda prelude to World War III. Whither Joel Gray?

_________________"Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation!" Eddie Izzard

The Pina Bausch London season opened at Sadlers Wells last night with a performance of Cafe Muller and The Rite of Spring. I think the Pina Bausch Rite must have been around for about thirty years now and is still one of the best versions to be seen, some would argue it is the best.

Fantastic performances all round were greeted with thunderous applause from the capacity audience. Too late to buy tickets I'm afraid as the entire run is sold out. I'll post some reviews as they appear.

And finally Clement Crisp, who takes it upon himself to criticize us the audience, as well as commenting on what he saw on stage

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I own to a mistrust of Tanztheater , or dance-theatre, or Euro-tedium - call it what you will. There are all the merry appurtenances of pretension: the secret physical language, the chatter, the angst and the cheery assumption that we need to understand about these private anxieties, these ill-behaved and self-obsessed dead-beats. But there is a public that eats it up with a spoon, and their guru is Pina Bausch.

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